Cerberus Technologies, in their own words: Cerberus is a company founded in 2017 by a team of visionary iGaming veterans. Our mission is simple – to offer the best tech solutions through a data-driven and a customer-first approach, delivering innovative solutions that go against traditional forms of working and process. This mission is based on the solid foundations of reliability, flexibility and security, and we intend to fundamentally change the way iGaming and other industries interact with technology.

Over the years, I have developed and created a number of data warehouses from scratch. Recently, I built a data warehouse for the iGaming industry single-handedly. To do it, I used the power and flexibility of Amazon Redshift and the wider AWS data management ecosystem. In this post, I explain how I was able to build a robust and scalable data warehouse without the large team of experts typically needed.

In two of my recent projects, I ran into challenges when scaling our data warehouse using on-premises infrastructure. Data was growing at many tens of gigabytes per day, and query performance was suffering. Scaling required major capital investment for hardware and software licenses, and also significant operational costs for maintenance and technical staff to keep it running and performing well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the resources needed to scale the infrastructure with data growth, and these projects were abandoned. Thanks to cloud data warehousing, the bottleneck of infrastructure resources, capital expense, and operational costs have been significantly reduced or have totally gone away. There is no more excuse for allowing obstacles of the past to delay delivering timely insights to decision makers, no matter how much data you have.

With Amazon Redshift and AWS, I delivered a cloud data warehouse to the business very quickly, and with a small team: me. I didn’t have to order hardware or software, and I no longer needed to install, configure, tune, or keep up with patches and version updates. Instead, I easily set up a robust data processing pipeline and we were quickly ingesting and analyzing data. Now, my data warehouse team can be extremely lean, and focus more time on bringing in new data and delivering insights. In this post, I show you the AWS services and the architecture that I used.

Handling data feeds

I have several different data sources that provide everything needed to run the business. The data includes activity from our iGaming platform, social media posts, clickstream data, marketing and campaign performance, and customer support engagements.

To handle the diversity of data feeds, I developed abstract integration applications using Docker that run on Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) and feed data to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. These data streams can be used for real time analytics. In my system, each record in Kinesis is preprocessed by an AWS Lambda function to cleanse and aggregate information. My system then routes it to be stored where I need on Amazon S3 by Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Suppose that you used an on-premises architecture to accomplish the same task. A team of data engineers would be required to maintain and monitor a Kafka cluster, develop applications to stream data, and maintain a Hadoop cluster and the infrastructure underneath it for data storage. With my stream processing architecture, there are no servers to manage, no disk drives to replace, and no service monitoring to write.

Setting up a Kinesis stream can be done with a few clicks, and the same for Kinesis Firehose. Firehose can be configured to automatically consume data from a Kinesis Data Stream, and then write compressed data every N minutes to Amazon S3. When I want to process a Kinesis data stream, it’s very easy to set up a Lambda function to be executed on each message received. I can just set a trigger from the AWS Lambda Management Console, as shown following.

Regardless of the format I receive the data from our partners, I can send it to Kinesis as JSON data using my own formatters. After Firehose writes this to Amazon S3, I have everything in nearly the same structure I received but compressed, encrypted, and optimized for reading.

This data is automatically crawled by AWS Glue and placed into the AWS Glue Data Catalog. This means that I can immediately query the data directly on S3 using Amazon Athena or through Amazon Redshift Spectrum. Previously, I used Amazon EMR and an Amazon RDS–based metastore in Apache Hive for catalog management. Now I can avoid the complexity of maintaining Hive Metastore catalogs. Glue takes care of high availability and the operations side so that I know that end users can always be productive.

Working with Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift for analysis

I found Amazon Athena extremely useful out of the box for ad hoc analysis. Our engineers (me) use Athena to understand new datasets that we receive and to understand what transformations will be needed for long-term query efficiency.

For our data analysts and data scientists, we’ve selected Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift has proven to be the right tool for us over and over again. It easily processes 20+ million transactions per day, regardless of the footprint of the tables and the type of analytics required by the business. Latency is low and query performance expectations have been more than met. We use Redshift Spectrum for long-term data retention, which enables me to extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond local data to anything stored in S3, and without requiring me to load any data. Redshift Spectrum gives me the freedom to store data where I want, in the format I want, and have it available for processing when I need it.

To load data directly into Amazon Redshift, I use AWS Data Pipeline to orchestrate data workflows. I create Amazon EMR clusters on an intra-day basis, which I can easily adjust to run more or less frequently as needed throughout the day. EMR clusters are used together with Amazon RDS, Apache Spark 2.0, and S3 storage. The data pipeline application loads ETL configurations from Spring RESTful services hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The application then loads data from S3 into memory, aggregates and cleans the data, and then writes the final version of the data to Amazon Redshift. This data is then ready to use for analysis. Spark on EMR also helps with recommendations and personalization use cases for various business users, and I find this easy to set up and deliver what users want. Finally, business users use Amazon QuickSight for self-service BI to slice, dice, and visualize the data depending on their requirements.

Each AWS service in this architecture plays its part in saving precious time that’s crucial for delivery and getting different departments in the business on board. I found the services easy to set up and use, and all have proven to be highly reliable for our use as our production environments. When the architecture was in place, scaling out was either completely handled by the service, or a matter of a simple API call, and crucially doesn’t require me to change one line of code. Increasing shards for Kinesis can be done in a minute by editing a stream. Increasing capacity for Lambda functions can be accomplished by editing the megabytes allocated for processing, and concurrency is handled automatically. EMR cluster capacity can easily be increased by changing the master and slave node types in Data Pipeline, or by using Auto Scaling. Lastly, RDS and Amazon Redshift can be easily upgraded without any major tasks to be performed by our team (again, me).

In the end, using AWS services including Kinesis, Lambda, Data Pipeline, and Amazon Redshift allows me to keep my team lean and highly productive. I eliminated the cost and delays of capital infrastructure, as well as the late night and weekend calls for support. I can now give maximum value to the business while keeping operational costs down. My team pushed out an agile and highly responsive data warehouse solution in record time and we can handle changing business requirements rapidly, and quickly adapt to new data and new user requests.

About the Author

Stephen Borg is the Head of Big Data and BI at Cerberus Technologies. He has a background in platform software engineering, and first became involved in data warehousing using the typical RDBMS, SQL, ETL, and BI tools. He quickly became passionate about providing insight to help others optimize the business and add personalization to products. He is now the Head of Big Data and BI at Cerberus Technologies.

AWS Fargate is a new technology that works with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. What does this mean? With Fargate, you no longer need to provision or manage a single virtual machine; you can just create tasks and run them directly!

Fargate uses the same API actions as ECS, so you can use the ECS console, the AWS CLI, or the ECS CLI. I recommend running through the first-run experience for Fargate even if you’re familiar with ECS. It creates all of the one-time setup requirements, such as the necessary IAM roles. If you’re using a CLI, make sure to upgrade to the latest version.

In this blog, you will see how to migrate ECS containers from running on Amazon EC2 to Fargate.

Getting started

Note: Anything with code blocks is a change in the task definition file. Screen captures are from the console. Additionally, Fargate is currently available in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) region.

Launch type

When you create tasks (grouping of containers) and clusters (grouping of tasks), you now have two launch type options: EC2 and Fargate. The default launch type, EC2, is ECS as you knew it before the announcement of Fargate. You need to specify Fargate as the launch type when running a Fargate task.

Even though Fargate abstracts away virtual machines, tasks still must be launched into a cluster. With Fargate, clusters are a logical infrastructure and permissions boundary that allow you to isolate and manage groups of tasks. ECS also supports heterogeneous clusters that are made up of tasks running on both EC2 and Fargate launch types.

The optional, new requiresCompatibilities parameter with FARGATE in the field ensures that your task definition only passes validation if you include Fargate-compatible parameters. Tasks can be flagged as compatible with EC2, Fargate, or both.

"requiresCompatibilities": [
"FARGATE"
]

Networking

"networkMode": "awsvpc"

In November, we announced the addition of task networking with the network mode awsvpc. By default, ECS uses the bridge network mode. Fargate requires using the awsvpc network mode.

In bridge mode, all of your tasks running on the same instance share the instance’s elastic network interface, which is a virtual network interface, IP address, and security groups.

The awsvpc mode provides this networking support to your tasks natively. You now get the same VPC networking and security controls at the task level that were previously only available with EC2 instances. Each task gets its own elastic networking interface and IP address so that multiple applications or copies of a single application can run on the same port number without any conflicts.

The awsvpc mode also provides a separation of responsibility for tasks. You can get complete control of task placement within your own VPCs, subnets, and the security policies associated with them, even though the underlying infrastructure is managed by Fargate. Also, you can assign different security groups to each task, which gives you more fine-grained security. You can give an application only the permissions it needs.

"portMappings": [
{
"containerPort": "3000"
}
]

What else has to change? First, you only specify a containerPort value, not a hostPort value, as there is no host to manage. Your container port is the port that you access on your elastic network interface IP address. Therefore, your container ports in a single task definition file need to be unique.

Additionally, links are not allowed as they are a property of the “bridge” network mode (and are now a legacy feature of Docker). Instead, containers share a network namespace and communicate with each other over the localhost interface. They can be referenced using the following:

localhost/127.0.0.1:<some_port_number>

CPU and memory

"memory": "1024",
"cpu": "256"
"memory": "1gb",
"cpu": ".25vcpu"

When launching a task with the EC2 launch type, task performance is influenced by the instance types that you select for your cluster combined with your task definition. If you pick larger instances, your applications make use of the extra resources if there is no contention.

In Fargate, you needed a way to get additional resource information so we created task-level resources. Task-level resources define the maximum amount of memory and cpu that your task can consume.

memory can be defined in MB with just the number, or in GB, for example, “1024” or “1gb”.

cpu can be defined as the number or in vCPUs, for example, “256” or “.25vcpu”.

vCPUs are virtual CPUs. You can look at the memory and vCPUs for instance types to get an idea of what you may have used before.

The memory and CPU options available with Fargate are:

CPU

Memory

256 (.25 vCPU)

0.5GB, 1GB, 2GB

512 (.5 vCPU)

1GB, 2GB, 3GB, 4GB

1024 (1 vCPU)

2GB, 3GB, 4GB, 5GB, 6GB, 7GB, 8GB

2048 (2 vCPU)

Between 4GB and 16GB in 1GB increments

4096 (4 vCPU)

Between 8GB and 30GB in 1GB increments

IAM roles

Because Fargate uses awsvpc mode, you need an Amazon ECS service-linked IAM role named AWSServiceRoleForECS. It provides Fargate with the needed permissions, such as the permission to attach an elastic network interface to your task. After you create your service-linked IAM role, you can delete the remaining roles in your services.

With the EC2 launch type, an instance role gives the agent the ability to pull, publish, talk to ECS, and so on. With Fargate, the task execution IAM role is only needed if you’re pulling from Amazon ECR or publishing data to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

Microservice-application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years. These days, applications operate with petabytes of data, need almost 100% uptime, and end users expect sub-second response times. Typical N-tier applications can’t deliver on these requirements.

Reactive Manifesto, published in 2014, describes the essential characteristics of reactive systems including: responsiveness, resiliency, elasticity, and being message driven.

Being message driven is perhaps the most important characteristic of reactive systems. Asynchronous messaging helps in the design of loosely coupled systems, which is a key factor for scalability. In order to build a highly decoupled system, it is important to isolate services from each other. As already described, isolation is an important aspect of the microservices pattern. Indeed, reactive systems and microservices are a natural fit.

Many ad-tracking companies collect massive amounts of data in near-real-time. In many cases, these workloads are very spiky and heavily depend on the success of the ad-tech companies’ customers. Typically, an ad-tracking-data use case can be separated into a real-time part and a non-real-time part. In the real-time part, it is important to collect data as fast as possible and ask several questions including:, “Is this a valid combination of parameters?,””Does this program exist?,” “Is this program still valid?”

Because response time has a huge impact on conversion rate in advertising, it is important for advertisers to respond as fast as possible. This information should be kept in memory to reduce communication overhead with the caching infrastructure. The tracking application itself should be as lightweight and scalable as possible. For example, the application shouldn’t have any shared mutable state and it should use reactive paradigms. In our implementation, one main application is responsible for this real-time part. It collects and validates data, responds to the client as fast as possible, and asynchronously sends events to backend systems.

The non-real-time part of the application consumes the generated events and persists them in a NoSQL database. In a typical tracking implementation, clicks, cookie information, and transactions are matched asynchronously and persisted in a data store. The matching part is not implemented in this reference architecture. Many ad-tech architectures use frameworks like Hadoop for the matching implementation.

The system can be logically divided into the data collection partand the core data updatepart. The data collection part is responsible for collecting, validating, and persisting the data. In the core data update part, the data that is used for validation gets updated and all subscribers are notified of new data.

Components and Services

Main Application The main application is implemented using Java 8 and uses Vert.x as the main framework. Vert.x is an event-driven, reactive, non-blocking, polyglot framework to implement microservices. It runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM) by using the low-level IO library Netty. You can write applications in Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby, Kotlin, Scala, and Ceylon. The framework offers a simple and scalable actor-like concurrency model. Vert.x calls handlers by using a thread known as an event loop. To use this model, you have to write code known as “verticles.” Verticles share certain similarities with actors in the actor model. To use them, you have to implement the verticle interface. Verticles communicate with each other by generating messages in a single event bus. Those messages are sent on the event bus to a specific address, and verticles can register to this address by using handlers.

With only a few exceptions, none of the APIs in Vert.x block the calling thread. Similar to Node.js, Vert.x uses the reactor pattern. However, in contrast to Node.js, Vert.x uses several event loops. Unfortunately, not all APIs in the Java ecosystem are written asynchronously, for example, the JDBC API. Vert.x offers a possibility to run this, blocking APIs without blocking the event loop. These special verticles are called worker verticles. You don’t execute worker verticles by using the standard Vert.x event loops, but by using a dedicated thread from a worker pool. This way, the worker verticles don’t block the event loop.

Our application consists of five different verticles covering different aspects of the business logic. The main entry point for our application is the HttpVerticle, which exposes an HTTP-endpoint to consume HTTP-requests and for proper health checking. Data from HTTP requests such as parameters and user-agent information are collected and transformed into a JSON message. In order to validate the input data (to ensure that the program exists and is still valid), the message is sent to the CacheVerticle.

This verticle implements an LRU-cache with a TTL of 10 minutes and a capacity of 100,000 entries. Instead of adding additional functionality to a standard JDK map implementation, we use Google Guava, which has all the features we need. If the data is not in the L1 cache, the message is sent to the RedisVerticle. This verticle is responsible for data residing in Amazon ElastiCache and uses the Vert.x-redis-client to read data from Redis. In our example, Redis is the central data store. However, in a typical production implementation, Redis would just be the L2 cache with a central data store like Amazon DynamoDB. One of the most important paradigms of a reactive system is to switch from a pull- to a push-based model. To achieve this and reduce network overhead, we’ll use Redis pub/sub to push core data changes to our main application.

The verticle subscribes to the appropriate Redis pub/sub-channel. If a message is sent over this channel, the payload is extracted and forwarded to the cache-verticle that stores the data in the L1-cache. After storing and enriching data, a response is sent back to the HttpVerticle, which responds to the HTTP request that initially hit this verticle. In addition, the message is converted to ByteBuffer, wrapped in protocol buffers, and send to an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream.

The following example shows a stripped-down version of the KinesisVerticle:

Kinesis Consumer This AWS Lambda function consumes data from an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream and persists the data in an Amazon DynamoDB table. In order to improve testability, the invocation code is separated from the business logic. The invocation code is implemented in the class KinesisConsumerHandler and iterates over the Kinesis events pulled from the Kinesis stream by AWS Lambda. Each Kinesis event is unwrapped and transformed from ByteBuffer to protocol buffers and converted into a Java object. Those Java objects are passed to the business logic, which persists the data in a DynamoDB table. In order to improve duration of successive Lambda calls, the DynamoDB-client is instantiated lazily and reused if possible.

Redis Updater From time to time, it is necessary to update core data in Redis. A very efficient implementation for this requirement is using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis. New core data is sent over the AWS Kinesis stream using JSON as data format and consumed by a Lambda function. This function iterates over the Kinesis events pulled from the Kinesis stream by AWS Lambda. Each Kinesis event is unwrapped and transformed from ByteBuffer to String and converted into a Java object. The Java object is passed to the business logic and stored in Redis. In addition, the new core data is also sent to the main application using Redis pub/sub in order to reduce network overhead and converting from a pull- to a push-based model.

The following example shows the source code to store data in Redis and notify all subscribers:

Infrastructure as Code As already outlined, latency and response time are a very critical part of any ad-tracking solution because response time has a huge impact on conversion rate. In order to reduce latency for customers world-wide, it is common practice to roll out the infrastructure in different AWS Regions in the world to be as close to the end customer as possible. AWS CloudFormation can help you model and set up your AWS resources so that you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your applications that run in AWS.

You create a template that describes all the AWS resources that you want (for example, Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon RDS DB instances), and AWS CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and configuring those resources for you. Our reference architecture can be rolled out in different Regions using an AWS CloudFormation template, which sets up the complete infrastructure (for example, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster, Lambda functions, DynamoDB table, Amazon ElastiCache cluster, etc.).

Conclusion In this blog post we described reactive principles and an example architecture with a common use case. We leveraged the capabilities of different frameworks in combination with several AWS services in order to implement reactive principles—not only at the application-level but also at the system-level. I hope I’ve given you ideas for creating your own reactive applications and systems on AWS.

About the Author

Sascha Moellering is a Senior Solution Architect. Sascha is primarily interested in automation, infrastructure as code, distributed computing, containers and JVM. He can be reached at [email protected]

Worth a read: this blog
posting from Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chair of MPEG, on
how (in his view) the group is being destroyed by free codecs and patent trolls.
“Good stories have an end, so the MPEG business model could not last
forever. Over the years proprietary and ‘royalty free’ products have
emerged but have not been able to dent the success of MPEG standards. More
importantly IP holders – often companies not interested in exploiting MPEG
standards, so called Non Practicing Entities (NPE) – have become more and
more aggressive in extracting value from their IP.”
(Thanks to Paul Wise).

AWS Fargate is a technology that allows you to focus on running your application without needing to provision, monitor, or manage the underlying compute infrastructure. You package your application into a Docker container that you can then launch using your container orchestration tool of choice.

Fargate allows you to use containers without being responsible for Amazon EC2 instances, similar to how EC2 allows you to run VMs without managing physical infrastructure. Currently, Fargate provides support for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Support for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) will be made available in the near future.

Despite offloading the responsibility for the underlying instances, Fargate still gives you deep control over configuration of network placement and policies. This includes the ability to use many networking fundamentals such as Amazon VPC and security groups.

This post covers how to take advantage of the different ways of networking your containers in Fargate when using ECS as your orchestration platform, with a focus on how to do networking securely.

The first step to running any application in Fargate is defining an ECS task for Fargate to launch. A task is a logical group of one or more Docker containers that are deployed with specified settings. When running a task in Fargate, there are two different forms of networking to consider:

Container (local) networking

External networking

Container Networking

Container networking is often used for tightly coupled application components. Perhaps your application has a web tier that is responsible for serving static content as well as generating some dynamic HTML pages. To generate these dynamic pages, it has to fetch information from another application component that has an HTTP API.

One potential architecture for such an application is to deploy the web tier and the API tier together as a pair and use local networking so the web tier can fetch information from the API tier.

If you are running these two components as two processes on a single EC2 instance, the web tier application process could communicate with the API process on the same machine by using the local loopback interface. The local loopback interface has a special IP address of 127.0.0.1 and hostname of localhost.

By making a networking request to this local interface, it bypasses the network interface hardware and instead the operating system just routes network calls from one process to the other directly. This gives the web tier a fast and efficient way to fetch information from the API tier with almost no networking latency.

In Fargate, when you launch multiple containers as part of a single task, they can also communicate with each other over the local loopback interface. Fargate uses a special container networking mode called awsvpc, which gives all the containers in a task a shared elastic network interface to use for communication.

If you specify a port mapping for each container in the task, then the containers can communicate with each other on that port. For example the following task definition could be used to deploy the web tier and the API tier:

ECS, with Fargate, is able to take this definition and launch two containers, each of which is bound to a specific static port on the elastic network interface for the task.

Because each Fargate task has its own isolated networking stack, there is no need for dynamic ports to avoid port conflicts between different tasks as in other networking modes. The static ports make it easy for containers to communicate with each other. For example, the web container makes a request to the API container using its well-known static port:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/my-endpoint

This sends a local network request, which goes directly from one container to the other over the local loopback interface without traversing the network. This deployment strategy allows for fast and efficient communication between two tightly coupled containers. But most application architectures require more than just internal local networking.

External Networking

External networking is used for network communications that go outside the task to other servers that are not part of the task, or network communications that originate from other hosts on the internet and are directed to the task.

Configuring external networking for a task is done by modifying the settings of the VPC in which you launch your tasks. A VPC is a fundamental tool in AWS for controlling the networking capabilities of resources that you launch on your account.

When setting up a VPC, you create one or more subnets, which are logical groups that your resources can be placed into. Each subnet has an Availability Zone and its own route table, which defines rules about how network traffic operates for that subnet. There are two main types of subnets: public and private.

Public subnets

A public subnet is a subnet that has an associated internet gateway. Fargate tasks in that subnet are assigned both private and public IP addresses:

A browser or other client on the internet can send network traffic to the task via the internet gateway using its public IP address. The tasks can also send network traffic to other servers on the internet because the route table can route traffic out via the internet gateway.

If tasks want to communicate directly with each other, they can use each other’s private IP address to send traffic directly from one to the other so that it stays inside the subnet without going out to the internet gateway and back in.

Private subnets

A private subnet does not have direct internet access. The Fargate tasks inside the subnet don’t have public IP addresses, only private IP addresses. Instead of an internet gateway, a network address translation (NAT) gateway is attached to the subnet:

There is no way for another server or client on the internet to reach your tasks directly, because they don’t even have an address or a direct route to reach them. This is a great way to add another layer of protection for internal tasks that handle sensitive data. Those tasks are protected and can’t receive any inbound traffic at all.

In this configuration, the tasks can still communicate to other servers on the internet via the NAT gateway. They would appear to have the IP address of the NAT gateway to the recipient of the communication. If you run a Fargate task in a private subnet, you must add this NAT gateway. Otherwise, Fargate can’t make a network request to Amazon ECR to download the container image, or communicate with Amazon CloudWatch to store container metrics.

Load balancers

If you are running a container that is hosting internet content in a private subnet, you need a way for traffic from the public to reach the container. This is generally accomplished by using a load balancer such as an Application Load Balancer or a Network Load Balancer.

ECS integrates tightly with AWS load balancers by automatically configuring a service-linked load balancer to send network traffic to containers that are part of the service. When each task starts, the IP address of its elastic network interface is added to the load balancer’s configuration. When the task is being shut down, network traffic is safely drained from the task before removal from the load balancer.

To get internet traffic to containers using a load balancer, the load balancer is placed into a public subnet. ECS configures the load balancer to forward traffic to the container tasks in the private subnet:

This configuration allows your tasks in Fargate to be safely isolated from the rest of the internet. They can still initiate network communication with external resources via the NAT gateway, and still receive traffic from the public via the Application Load Balancer that is in the public subnet.

Another potential use case for a load balancer is for internal communication from one service to another service within the private subnet. This is typically used for a microservice deployment, in which one service such as an internet user account service needs to communicate with an internal service such as a password service. Obviously, it is undesirable for the password service to be directly accessible on the internet, so using an internet load balancer would be a major security vulnerability. Instead, this can be accomplished by hosting an internal load balancer within the private subnet:

With this approach, one container can distribute requests across an Auto Scaling group of other private containers via the internal load balancer, ensuring that the network traffic stays safely protected within the private subnet.

Best Practices for Fargate Networking

Determine whether you should use local task networking

Local task networking is ideal for communicating between containers that are tightly coupled and require maximum networking performance between them. However, when you deploy one or more containers as part of the same task they are always deployed together so it removes the ability to independently scale different types of workload up and down.

In the example of the application with a web tier and an API tier, it may be the case that powering the application requires only two web tier containers but 10 API tier containers. If local container networking is used between these two container types, then an extra eight unnecessary web tier containers would end up being run instead of allowing the two different services to scale independently.

A better approach would be to deploy the two containers as two different services, each with its own load balancer. This allows clients to communicate with the two web containers via the web service’s load balancer. The web service could distribute requests across the eight backend API containers via the API service’s load balancer.

Run internet tasks that require internet access in a public subnet

If you have tasks that require internet access and a lot of bandwidth for communication with other services, it is best to run them in a public subnet. Give them public IP addresses so that each task can communicate with other services directly.

If you run these tasks in a private subnet, then all their outbound traffic has to go through an NAT gateway. AWS NAT gateways support up to 10 Gbps of burst bandwidth. If your bandwidth requirements go over this, then all task networking starts to get throttled. To avoid this, you could distribute the tasks across multiple private subnets, each with their own NAT gateway. It can be easier to just place the tasks into a public subnet, if possible.

Avoid using a public subnet or public IP addresses for private, internal tasks

If you are running a service that handles private, internal information, you should not put it into a public subnet or use a public IP address. For example, imagine that you have one task, which is an API gateway for authentication and access control. You have another background worker task that handles sensitive information.

The intended access pattern is that requests from the public go to the API gateway, which then proxies request to the background task only if the request is from an authenticated user. If the background task is in a public subnet and has a public IP address, then it could be possible for an attacker to bypass the API gateway entirely. They could communicate directly to the background task using its public IP address, without being authenticated.

Conclusion

Fargate gives you a way to run containerized tasks directly without managing any EC2 instances, but you still have full control over how you want networking to work. You can set up containers to talk to each other over the local network interface for maximum speed and efficiency. For running workloads that require privacy and security, use a private subnet with public internet access locked down. Or, for simplicity with an internet workload, you can just use a public subnet and give your containers a public IP address.

To deploy one of these Fargate task networking approaches, check out some sample CloudFormation templates showing how to configure the VPC, subnets, and load balancers.

So, what’s Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)? ECS is a managed service for running containers on AWS, designed to make it easy to run applications in the cloud without worrying about configuring the environment for your code to run in. Using ECS, you can easily deploy containers to host a simple website or run complex distributed microservices using thousands of containers.

Getting started with ECS isn’t too difficult. To fully understand how it works and how you can use it, it helps to understand the basic building blocks of ECS and how they fit together!

Let’s begin with an analogy

Imagine you’re in a virtual reality game with blocks and portals, in which your task is to build kingdoms.

In your spaceship, you pull up a holographic map of your upcoming destination: Nozama, a golden-orange planet. Looking at its various regions, you see that the nearest one is za-southwest-1 (SWNozama). You set your destination, and use your jump drive to jump to the outer atmosphere of za-southwest-1.

As you approach SW Nozama, you see three portals, 1a, 1b, and 1c. Each portal lets you transport directly to an isolated zone (Availability Zone), where you can start construction on your new kingdom (cluster), Royaume.

With your supply of blocks, you take the portal to 1b, and erect the surrounding walls of your first territory (instance)*.

Before you get ahead of yourself, there are some rules to keep in mind. For your territory to be a part of Royaume, the land ordinance requires construction of a building (container), specifically a castle, from which your territory’s lord (agent)* rules.

You can then create architectural plans (task definitions) to build your developments (tasks), consisting of up to 10 buildings per plan. A development can be built now within this or any territory, or multiple territories.

If you do decide to create more territories, you can either stay here in 1b or take a portal to another location in SW Nozama and start building there.

Amazon EC2 building blocks

We currently provide two launch types: EC2 and Fargate. With Fargate, the Amazon EC2 instances are abstracted away and managed for you. Instead of worrying about ECS container instances, you can just worry about tasks. In this post, the infrastructure components used by ECS that are handled by Fargate are marked with a *.

Instance*

EC2 instances are good ol’ virtual machines (VMs). And yes, don’t worry, you can connect to them (via SSH). Because customers have varying needs in memory, storage, and computing power, many different instance types are offered. Just want to run a small application or try a free trial? Try t2.micro. Want to run memory-optimized workloads? R3 and X1 instances are a couple options. There are many more instance types as well, which cater to various use cases.

AMI*

Sorry if you wanted to immediately march forward, but before you create your instance, you need to choose an AMI. An AMI stands for Amazon Machine Image. What does that mean? Basically, an AMI provides the information required to launch an instance: root volume, launch permissions, and volume-attachment specifications. You can find and choose a Linux or Windows AMI provided by AWS, the user community, the AWS Marketplace (for example, the Amazon ECS-Optimized AMI), or you can create your own.

Region

AWS is divided into regions that are geographic areas around the world (for now it’s just Earth, but maybe someday…). These regions have semi-evocative names such as us-east-1 (N. Virginia), us-west-2 (Oregon), eu-central-1 (Frankfurt), ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo), etc.

Each region is designed to be completely isolated from the others, and consists of multiple, distinct data centers. This creates a “blast radius” for failure so that even if an entire region goes down, the others aren’t affected. Like many AWS services, to start using ECS, you first need to decide the region in which to operate. Typically, this is the region nearest to you or your users.

Availability Zone

AWS regions are subdivided into Availability Zones. A region has at minimum two zones, and up to a handful. Zones are physically isolated from each other, spanning one or more different data centers, but are connected through low-latency, fiber-optic networking, and share some common facilities. EC2 is designed so that the most common failures only affect a single zone to prevent region-wide outages. This means you can achieve high availability in a region by spanning your services across multiple zones and distributing across hosts.

Amazon ECS building blocks

Container

Are containers virtual machines? Nope! Virtual machines virtualize the hardware (benefits), while containers virtualize the operating system (even more benefits!). If you look inside a container, you would see that it is made by processes running on the host, and tied together by kernel constructs like namespaces, cgroups, etc. But you don’t need to bother about that level of detail, at least not in this post!

Why containers? Containers give you the ability to build, ship, and run your code anywhere!

Before the cloud, you needed to self-host and therefore had to buy machines in addition to setting up and configuring the operating system (OS), and running your code. In the cloud, with virtualization, you can just skip to setting up the OS and running your code. Containers make the process even easier—you can just run your code.

Additionally, all of the dependencies travel in a package with the code, which is called an image. This allows containers to be deployed on any host machine. From the outside, it looks like a host is just holding a bunch of containers. They all look the same, in the sense that they are generic enough to be deployed on any host.

With ECS, you can easily run your containerized code and applications across a managed cluster of EC2 instances.

Are containers a fairly new technology? The concept of containerization is not new. Its origins date back to 1979 with the creation of chroot. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that containers became a major technology. The most significant milestone to date was the release of Docker in 2013, which led to the popularization and widespread adoption of containers.

What does ECS use? While other container technologies exist (LXC, rkt, etc.), because of its massive adoption and use by our customers, ECS was designed first to work natively with Docker containers.

And as you probably guessed, in these instances, you are running containers.

AMI*

These container instances can use any AMI as long as it has the following specifications: a modern Linux distribution with the agent and the Docker Daemon with any Docker runtime dependencies running on it.

Want it more simplified? Well, AWS created the Amazon ECS-Optimized AMI for just that. Not only does that AMI come preconfigured with all of the previously mentioned specifications, it’s tested and includes the recommended ecs-init upstart process to run and monitor the agent.

Cluster

An ECS cluster is a grouping of (container) instances* (or tasks in Fargate) that lie within a single region, but can span multiple Availability Zones – it’s even a good idea for redundancy. When launching an instance (or tasks in Fargate), unless specified, it registers with the cluster named “default”. If “default” doesn’t exist, it is created. You can also scale and delete your clusters.

Agent*

The Amazon ECS container agent is a Go program that runs in its own container within each EC2 instance that you use with ECS. (It’s also available open source on GitHub!) The agent is the intermediary component that takes care of the communication between the scheduler and your instances. Want to register your instance into a cluster? (Why wouldn’t you? A cluster is both a logical boundary and provider of pool of resources!) Then you need to run the agent on it.

Task

When you want to start a container, it has to be part of a task. Therefore, you have to create a task first. Succinctly, tasks are a logical grouping of 1 to N containers that run together on the same instance, with N defined by you, up to 10. Let’s say you want to run a custom blog engine. You could put together a web server, an application server, and an in-memory cache, each in their own container. Together, they form a basic frontend unit.

Task definition

Ah, but you cannot create a task directly. You have to create a task definition that tells ECS that “task definition X is composed of this container (and maybe that other container and that other container too!).” It’s kind of like an architectural plan for a city. Some other details it can include are how the containers interact, container CPU and memory constraints, and task permissions using IAM roles.

Then you can tell ECS, “start one task using task definition X.” It might sound like unnecessary planning at first. As soon as you start to deal with multiple tasks, scaling, upgrades, and other “real life” scenarios, you’ll be glad that you have task definitions to keep track of things!

Scheduler*

So, the scheduler schedules… sorry, this should be more helpful, huh? The scheduler is part of the “hosted orchestration layer” provided by ECS. Wait a minute, what do I mean by “hosted orchestration”? Simply put, hosted means that it’s operated by ECS on your behalf, without you having to care about it. Your applications are deployed in containers running on your instances, but the managing of tasks is taken care of by ECS. One less thing to worry about!

Also, the scheduler is the component that decides what (which containers) gets to run where (on which instances), according to a number of constraints. Say that you have a custom blog engine to scale for high availability. You could create a service, which by default, spreads tasks across all zones in the chosen region. And if you want each task to be on a different instance, you can use the distinctInstancetask placement constraint. ECS makes sure that not only this happens, but if a task fails, it starts again.

Service

To ensure that you always have your task running without managing it yourself, you can create a service based on the task that you defined and ECS ensures that it stays running. A service is a special construct that says, “at any given time, I want to make sure that N tasks using task definition X1 are running.” If N=1, it just means “make sure that this task is running, and restart it if needed!” And with N>1, you’re basically scaling your application until you hit N, while also ensuring each task is running.

So, what now?

Hopefully you, at the very least, learned a tiny something. All comments are very welcome!

Want to discuss ECS with others? Join the amazon-ecs slack group, which members of the community created and manage.

Also, if you’re interested in learning more about the core concepts of ECS and its relation to EC2, here are some resources:

Jason Barnett used the pots feature of the Monzo banking API to create a simple e-paper display so that his kids can keep track of their pocket money.

Monzo

For those outside the UK: Monzo is a smartphone-based bank that allows costumers to manage their money and payment cards via an app, removing the bank clerk middleman.

In the Monzo banking app, users can set up pots, which allow them to organise their money into various, you guessed it, pots. You want to put aside holiday funds, budget your food shopping, or, like Jason, manage your kids’ pocket money? Using pots is an easy way to do it.

Jason’s Monzo Pot ePaper tracker

After failed attempts at keeping track of his sons’ pocket money via a scrap of paper stuck to the fridge, Jason decided to try a new approach.

He started his build by installing Stretch Lite to the SD card of his Raspberry Pi Zero W. “The Pi will be running headless (without screen, mouse or keyboard)”, he explains on his blog, “so there is no need for a full-fat Raspbian image.” While Stretch Lite was downloading, he set up the Waveshare ePaper HAT on his Zero W. He notes that Pimoroni’s “Inky pHAT would be easiest,” but his tutorial is specific to the Waveshare device.

Before ejecting the SD card, Jason updated the boot partition to allow him to access the Pi via SSH. He talks makers through that process here.

Among the libraries he installed for the project is pyMonzo, a Python wrapper for the Monzo API created by Paweł Adamczak. Monzo is still in its infancy, and the API is partly under construction. Until it’s completed, Paweł’s wrapper offers a more stable way to use it.

After installing the software, it was time to set up the e-paper screen for the tracker. Jason adjusted the code for the API so that the screen reloads information every 15 minutes, displaying the up-to-date amount of pocket money in both kids’ pots.

Here is how Jason describes going to the supermarket with his sons, now that he has completed the tracker:

“Daddy, I want (insert first thing picked up here), I’ve always wanted one of these my whole life!” […] Even though you have never seen that (insert thing here) before, I can quickly open my Monzo app, flick to Account, and say “You have £3.50 in your money box”. If my boy wants it, a 2-second withdrawal is made whilst queueing, and done — he walks away with a new (again, insert whatever he wanted his whole life here) and is happy!

Jason’s blog offers a full breakdown of his project, including all necessary code and the specs for the physical build. Be sure to head over and check it out.

AWS recently announced the general availability of Windows container management for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Docker containers and Amazon ECS make it easy to run and scale applications on a virtual machine by abstracting the complex cluster management and setup needed.

Classic .NET applications are developed with .NET Framework 4.7.1 or older and can run only on a Windows platform. These include Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), ASP.NET Web Forms, and an ASP.NET MVC web app or web API.

Why classic ASP.NET?

ASP.NET MVC 4.6 and older versions of ASP.NET occupy a significant footprint in the enterprise web application space. As enterprises move towards microservices for new or existing applications, containers are one of the stepping stones for migrating from monolithic to microservices architectures. Additionally, the support for Windows containers in Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, and Visual Studio Tooling support for Docker simplifies the containerization of ASP.NET MVC apps.

Getting started

In this post, you pick an ASP.NET 4.6.2 MVC application and get step-by-step instructions for migrating to ECS using Windows containers. The detailed steps, AWS CloudFormation template, Microsoft Visual Studio solution, ECS service definition, and ECS task definition are available in the aws-ecs-windows-aspnet GitHub repository.

To help you getting started running Windows containers, here is the reference architecture for Windows containers on GitHub: ecs-refarch-cloudformation-windows. This reference architecture is the layered CloudFormation stack, in that it calls the other stacks to create the environment. The CloudFormation YAML template in this reference architecture is referenced to create a single JSON CloudFormation stack, which is used in the steps for the migration.

Steps for Migration

Your development environment needs to have the latest version and updates for Visual Studio 2017, Windows 10, and Docker for Windows Stable.

Next, containerize the ASP.NET application and test it locally. The size of Windows container application images is generally larger compared to Linux containers. This is because the base image of the Windows container itself is large in size, typically greater than 9 GB.

After the application is containerized, the container image needs to be pushed to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). Images stored in ECR are compressed to improve pull times and reduce storage costs. In this case, you can see that ECR compresses the image to around 1 GB, for an optimization factor of 90%.

Create a CloudFormation stack using the template in the ‘CloudFormation template’ folder. This creates an ECS service, task definition (referring the containerized ASP.NET application), and other related components mentioned in the ECS reference architecture for Windows containers.

After the stack is created, verify the successful creation of the ECS service, ECS instances, running tasks (with the threshold mentioned in the task definition), and the Application Load Balancer’s successful health check against running containers.

Navigate to the Application Load Balancer URL and see the successful rendering of the containerized ASP.NET MVC app in the browser.

Key Notes

Generally, Windows container images occupy large amount of space (in the order of few GBs).

All the task definition parameters for Linux containers are not available for Windows containers. For more information, see Windows Task Definitions.

An Application Load Balancer can be configured to route requests to one or more ports on each container instance in a cluster. The dynamic port mapping allows you to have multiple tasks from a single service on the same container instance.

IAM roles for Windows tasks require extra configuration. For more information, see Windows IAM Roles for Tasks. For this post, configuration was handled by the CloudFormation template.

Summary

In this post, you migrated an ASP.NET MVC application to ECS using Windows containers.

The logical next step is to automate the activities for migration to ECS and build a fully automated continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for Windows containers. This can be orchestrated by leveraging services such as AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon ECR, and Amazon ECS. You can learn more about how this is done in the Set Up a Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Containers Using AWS CodePipeline and Amazon ECS post.

This is a guest post by Yukinori Koide, an the head of development for the Newspass department at Gunosy.

Gunosy is a news curation application that covers a wide range of topics, such as entertainment, sports, politics, and gourmet news. The application has been installed more than 20 million times.

Gunosy aims to provide people with the content they want without the stress of dealing with a large influx of information. We analyze user attributes, such as gender and age, and past activity logs like click-through rate (CTR). We combine this information with article attributes to provide trending, personalized news articles to users.

Why does Gunosy need real-time processing?

Users need fresh and personalized news. There are two constraints to consider when delivering appropriate articles:

Time: Articles have freshness—that is, they lose value over time. New articles need to reach users as soon as possible.

Frequency (volume): Only a limited number of articles can be shown. It’s unreasonable to display all articles in the application, and users can’t read all of them anyway.

To deliver fresh articles with a high probability that the user is interested in them, it’s necessary to include not only past user activity logs and some feature values of articles, but also the most recent (real-time) user activity logs.

We optimize the delivery of articles with these two steps.

Personalization: Deliver articles based on each user’s attributes, past activity logs, and feature values of each article—to account for each user’s interests.

Optimizing the delivery of articles is always a cold start. Initially, we deliver articles based on past logs. We then use real-time data to optimize as quickly as possible. In addition, news has a short freshness time. Specifically, day-old news is past news, and even the news that is three hours old is past news. Therefore, shortening the time between step 1 and step 2 is important.

To tackle this issue, we chose AWS for processing streaming data because of its fully managed services, cost-effectiveness, and so on.

Solution

The following diagrams depict the architecture for optimizing article delivery by processing real-time user activity logs

There are three processing flows:

Process real-time user activity logs.

Store and process all user-based and article-based logs.

Execute ad hoc or heavy queries.

In this post, I focus on the first processing flow and explain how it works.

Process real-time user activity logs

The following are the steps for processing user activity logs in real time using Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Analytics.

The Fluentd server sends the following user activity logs to Kinesis Data Streams:

Batch servers get results from Amazon ES every minute. They then optimize delivering articles with other data sources using a proprietary optimization algorithm.

How to connect a stream to another stream in another AWS Region

When we built the solution, Kinesis Data Analytics was not available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, so we used the US West (Oregon) Region. The following shows how we connected a data stream to another data stream in the other Region.

There is no need to continue containing all components in a single AWS Region, unless you have a situation where a response difference at the millisecond level is critical to the service.

Benefits

The solution provides benefits for both our company and for our users. Benefits for the company are cost savings—including development costs, operational costs, and infrastructure costs—and reducing delivery time. Users can now find articles of interest more quickly. The solution can process more than 500,000 records per minute, and it enables fast and personalized news curating for our users.

Conclusion

In this post, I showed you how we optimize trending user activities to personalize news using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, and related AWS services in Gunosy.

AWS gives us a quick and economical solution and a good experience.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Additional Reading

About the Authors

Yukinori Koide is the head of development for the Newspass department at Gunosy. He is working on standardization of provisioning and deployment flow, promoting the utilization of serverless and containers for machine learning and AI services. His favorite AWS services are DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, and ECS.

Akihiro Tsukada is a start-up solutions architect with AWS. He supports start-up companies in Japan technically at many levels, ranging from seed to later-stage.

Yuta Ishii is a solutions architect with AWS. He works with our customers to provide architectural guidance for building media & entertainment services, helping them improve the value of their services when using AWS.

Some systems or applications require Transport Layer Security (TLS) traffic from the client all the way through to the Docker container, without offloading or terminating certificates at a load balancer. Some highly time-sensitive services may require communication over TLS without any decryption and re-encryption in the communication path.

There are multiple options for this type of implementation on AWS. One option is to use a service discovery tool to implement the requirements, but that creates overhead from an implementation and management perspective. In this post, I examine the option of using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with a Network Load Balancer.

Amazon ECS is a highly scalable, high-performance service for running Docker containers on AWS. It is integrated with each of the Elastic Load Balancing load balancers offered by AWS:

The Classic Load Balancer supports application or network level traffic and can be used to pass through the TLS traffic when configured with TCP listeners. This approach limits the number of containers to be deployed by Amazon ECS to one per EC2 host. This approach is only available for the ECS launch type of EC2, not Fargate. This is due to Classic Load Balancer not supporting target groups, so dynamic port mapping can’t be leveraged for this type of implementation.

The Application Load Balancer functions at the application layer, the layer 7 of Open System Interconnection (OSI) and supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols. By operating at layer 7, the Application Load Balancer is able to route traffic based on the request path in the URL. It can also provide SSL offloading or termination of the SSL certificates for applications, by hosting the SSL certificate. The Application Load Balancer integrates well with ECS by providing the functionality of the target groups for the container instances, which allows for port mapping and targeting container groups. Port mappings allows the containers to run on different ports but still be represented by the one port configured on the ALB as part of the target group of the task.

The Network Load Balancer, which is a high performance, ultra-low latency load balancer that operates at layer 4. It is designed to handle tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra-low latency. Operating at layer 4 networking means that the traffic is passed onto the targets based on the IP addresses and ports as oppose to session information or cookies, as is the case with Application Load Balancers. The Network Load Balancer also supports long-lived TCP connections, which are ideal for WebSocket type of applications . Some applications communicate on TCP protocols rather than solely on HTTP and HTTPS. The Network Load Balancer provides the support to load balance between services that require protocols besides HTTP and HTTPS.

The Network Load Balancer is the best option for managing secure traffic as it provides support for TCP traffic pass through, without decrypting and then re-encrypting the traffic. Additionally, the Network Load Balancer supports target groups, which means port mapping can be used, as well as configuring the load balancer as part of the task definition for the containers.

Architecture

The diagram below shows a high-level architecture with TLS traffic coming from the internet that passes through the VPC to the Network Load Balancer, then to a container without offloading or terminating the certificate in the path.

In this diagram, there are three containers running in an ECS cluster. The ECS cluster can be either the EC2 or Fargate launch type.

The following diagram shows an architecture that contains two different services deployed in two different ECS clusters.

In this architecture, the containers in each of the clusters can reference the other containers securely via the Network Load Balancer without terminating or offloading the certificates until it reaches the destination container.

This approach addresses the requirements where containers need to communicate securely whether they are deployed in one VPC, across VPCs, or in separate AWS accounts.

The following diagram below shows both TLS connections from the internet, as well as connections from within the same cluster.

The above approach is achieved by using the same Network Load Balancer for the cluster to serve two different services. Implement this by using two different target groups (one for each service) and associating them with the ECS task definition. The containers use the DNS name associated with the Network Load Balancer to access the containers in the other service.

Summary

The architectures in this post show how the Network Load Balancer integrates seamlessly with ECS and other AWS services, providing end-to-end TLS communication across services without offloading or terminating the certificates. This gives you the ability to use dynamic ports in ECS containers. It can also handle tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra-low latency for applications that require the TCP protocol.

Introducing AWS Auto Scaling Today we are making it easier for you to use the Auto Scaling features of multiple AWS services from a single user interface with the introduction of AWS Auto Scaling. This new service unifies and builds on our existing, service-specific, scaling features. It operates on any desired EC2 Auto Scaling groups, EC2 Spot Fleets, ECS tasks, DynamoDB tables, DynamoDB Global Secondary Indexes, and Aurora Replicas that are part of your application, as described by an AWS CloudFormation stack or in AWS Elastic Beanstalk (we’re also exploring some other ways to flag a set of resources as an application for use with AWS Auto Scaling).

You no longer need to set up alarms and scaling actions for each resource and each service. Instead, you simply point AWS Auto Scaling at your application and select the services and resources of interest. Then you select the desired scaling option for each one, and AWS Auto Scaling will do the rest, helping you to discover the scalable resources and then creating a scaling plan that addresses the resources of interest.

If you have tried to use any of our Auto Scaling options in the past, you undoubtedly understand the trade-offs involved in choosing scaling thresholds. AWS Auto Scaling gives you a variety of scaling options: You can optimize for availability, keeping plenty of resources in reserve in order to meet sudden spikes in demand. You can optimize for costs, running close to the line and accepting the possibility that you will tax your resources if that spike arrives. Alternatively, you can aim for the middle, with a generous but not excessive level of spare capacity. In addition to optimizing for availability, cost, or a blend of both, you can also set a custom scaling threshold. In each case, AWS Auto Scaling will create scaling policies on your behalf, including appropriate upper and lower bounds for each resource.

AWS Auto Scaling in Action I will use AWS Auto Scaling on a simple CloudFormation stack consisting of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances and a pair of DynamoDB tables. I start by removing the existing Scaling Policies from my Auto Scaling group:

Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk applications are always launched via a CloudFormation stack. In the screen shot above, awseb-e-sdwttqizbp-stack is an Elastic Beanstalk application that I launched.

I can click on any stack to learn more about it before proceeding:

I select the desired stack and click on Next to proceed. Then I enter a name for my scaling plan and choose the resources that I’d like it to include:

I choose the scaling strategy for each type of resource:

After I have selected the desired strategies, I click Next to proceed. Then I review the proposed scaling plan, and click Create scaling plan to move ahead:

The scaling plan is created and in effect within a few minutes:

I can click on the plan to learn more:

I can also inspect each scaling policy:

I tested my new policy by applying a load to the initial EC2 instance, and watched the scale out activity take place:

I also took a look at the CloudWatch metrics for the EC2 Auto Scaling group:

Available Now We are launching AWS Auto Scaling today in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions today, with more to follow. There’s no charge for AWS Auto Scaling; you pay only for the CloudWatch Alarms that it creates and any AWS resources that you consume.

As is often the case with our new services, this is just the first step on what we hope to be a long and interesting journey! We have a long roadmap, and we’ll be adding new features and options throughout 2018 in response to your feedback.

Robert O’Callahan notes
an important development in the fight for media codecs without patent
issues. “Apple joining the Alliance for Open Media is a really big
deal. Now all the most powerful tech companies — Google, Microsoft, Apple,
Mozilla, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia — plus content providers
like Netflix and Hulu are on board. I guess there’s still no guarantee
Apple products will support AV1, but it would seem pointless for Apple to
join AOM if they’re not going to use it: apparently AOM membership obliges
Apple to provide a royalty-free license to any ‘essential patents’ it holds
for AV1 usage.”

Building and deploying containerized services manually is slow and prone to errors. Continuous delivery with automated build and test mechanisms helps detect errors early, saves time, and reduces failures, making this a popular model for application deployments. Previously, to automate your container workflows with ECS, you had to build your own solution using AWS CloudFormation. Now, you can integrate CodePipeline and CodeBuild with ECS to automate your workflows in just a few steps.

A typical continuous delivery workflow with CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and ECS might look something like the following:

Choosing your source

Building your project

Deploying your code

We also have a continuous deployment reference architecture on GitHub for this workflow.

Getting Started

First, create a new project with CodePipeline and give the project a name, such as “demo”.

Next, choose a source location where the code is stored. This could be AWS CodeCommit, GitHub, or Amazon S3. For this example, enter GitHub and then give CodePipeline access to the repository.

Next, add a build step. You can import an existing build, such as a Jenkins server URL or CodeBuild project, or create a new step with CodeBuild. If you don’t have an existing build project in CodeBuild, create one from within CodePipeline:

Build provider: AWS CodeBuild

Configure your project: Create a new build project

Environment image: Use an image managed by AWS CodeBuild

Operating system: Ubuntu

Runtime: Docker

Version: aws/codebuild/docker:1.12.1

Build specification: Use the buildspec.yml in the source code root directory

Now that you’ve created the CodeBuild step, you can use it as an existing project in CodePipeline.

Next, add a deployment provider. This is where your built code is placed. It can be a number of different options, such as AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, or Amazon ECS. For this example, connect to Amazon ECS.

For CodeBuild to deploy to ECS, you must create an image definition JSON file. This requires adding some instructions to the pre-build, build, and post-build phases of the CodeBuild build process in your buildspec.yml file. For help with creating the image definition file, see Step 1 of the Tutorial: Continuous Deployment with AWS CodePipeline.

Deployment provider: Amazon ECS

Cluster name: enter your project name from the build step

Service name: web

Image filename: enter your image definition filename (“web.json”).

You are almost done!

You can now choose an existing IAM service role that CodePipeline can use to access resources in your account, or let CodePipeline create one. For this example, use the wizard, and go with the role that it creates (AWS-CodePipeline-Service).

Finally, review all of your changes, and choose Create pipeline.

After the pipeline is created, you’ll have a model of your entire pipeline where you can view your executions, add different tests, add manual approvals, or release a change.

The Paris Region will benefit from three AWS Direct Connect locations. Telehouse Voltaire is available today. AWS Direct Connect will also become available at Equinix Paris in early 2018, followed by Interxion Paris.

All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet the most rigorous compliance standards and to provide high levels of security for all AWS customers. These include ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), SOC 2 and SOC 3 Security & Availability, PCI DSS Level 1, and many more. This means customers benefit from all the best practices of AWS policies, architecture, and operational processes built to satisfy the needs of even the most security sensitive customers.

AWS is certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield, and the AWS Data Processing Addendum (DPA) is GDPR-ready and available now to all AWS customers to help them prepare for May 25, 2018 when the GDPR becomes enforceable. The current AWS DPA, as well as the AWS GDPR DPA, allows customers to transfer personal data to countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA) in compliance with European Union (EU) data protection laws. AWS also adheres to the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) Code of Conduct. The CISPE Code of Conduct helps customers ensure that AWS is using appropriate data protection standards to protect their data, consistent with the GDPR. In addition, AWS offers a wide range of services and features to help customers meet the requirements of the GDPR, including services for access controls, monitoring, logging, and encryption.

From Our Customers Many AWS customers are preparing to use this new Region. Here’s a small sample:

Societe Generale, one of the largest banks in France and the world, has accelerated their digital transformation while working with AWS. They developed SG Research, an application that makes reports from Societe Generale’s analysts available to corporate customers in order to improve the decision-making process for investments. The new AWS Region will reduce latency between applications running in the cloud and in their French data centers.

SNCF is the national railway company of France. Their mobile app, powered by AWS, delivers real-time traffic information to 14 million riders. Extreme weather, traffic events, holidays, and engineering works can cause usage to peak at hundreds of thousands of users per second. They are planning to use machine learning and big data to add predictive features to the app.

Radio France, the French public radio broadcaster, offers seven national networks, and uses AWS to accelerate its innovation and stay competitive.

Les Restos du Coeur, a French charity that provides assistance to the needy, delivering food packages and participating in their social and economic integration back into French society. Les Restos du Coeur is using AWS for its CRM system to track the assistance given to each of their beneficiaries and the impact this is having on their lives.

AlloResto by JustEat (a leader in the French FoodTech industry), is using AWS to to scale during traffic peaks and to accelerate their innovation process.

AWS Consulting and Technology Partners We are already working with a wide variety of consulting, technology, managed service, and Direct Connect partners in France. Here’s a partial list:

AWS in France We have been investing in Europe, with a focus on France, for the last 11 years. We have also been developing documentation and training programs to help our customers to improve their skills and to accelerate their journey to the AWS Cloud.

As part of our commitment to AWS customers in France, we plan to train more than 25,000 people in the coming years, helping them develop highly sought after cloud skills. They will have access to AWS training resources in France via AWS Academy, AWSome days, AWS Educate, and webinars, all delivered in French by AWS Technical Trainers and AWS Certified Trainers.

Use it Today The EU (Paris) Region is open for business now and you can start using it today!

We’ve eclipsed the 400 Petabyte mark and our data center continues to grow. What does that mean? It means we need more great people working in our data centers making sure that the hard drives keep spinning and that sputtering drives are promptly dealt with. Lorelei is the newest Data Center Technician to join our ranks. Let’s learn a bit more about Lorelei, shall we?

What is your Backblaze Title?
DC Tech!! I’m the saucy one.

Where are you originally from?
San Francisco/Bowling Green, Ohio. Just moved up to Sacramento this year, and it’s so nice to have four seasons again. I’m drowning in leaves but I’m totally OK with it.

What attracted you to Backblaze?
I was a librarian in my previous life, mainly because I believe that information should be open to everyone. I was familiar with Backblaze prior to joining the team, and I’m a huge fan of their fresh approach to sharing information and openness. The interview process was also the coolest one I’ll ever have!

What do you expect to learn while being at Backblaze?
A lot about Linux!

Where else have you worked?
A chocolate factory and a popular culture library.

Where did you go to school?
CSU East Bay, Bowling Green State University (go Falcons), and Clarion.

Favorite place you’ve traveled?
Stockholm & Tokyo! I hope to travel more in Asia and Europe.

Favorite hobby?
Music is not magic, but music is…
Come sing with me @ karaoke!

Favorite food?
I love trying new food. I love anything that’s acidic, sweet, fresh, salty, flavorful. Fruit is the best food, but everything else is good too. I’m one of those Yelp people: always seeking & giving food recs!

Why do you like certain things?
I like things that make me happy and that make other people happy. Have fun & enjoy life. Yeeeeehaw.

Welcome to the team Lorelei. And thank you very much for leaving Yelp reviews. It’s nice to give back to the community!

Online piracy is a global issue. Pirate sites and services tend to operate in multiple jurisdictions and are purposefully set up to evade law enforcement.

This makes it hard for police from one country to effectively crack down on a site in another. International cooperation is often required, and the US Government is one of the leaders on this front.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has quite a bit of experience in tracking down pirates and they are actively sharing this knowledge with countries that can use some help. This goes far beyond the occasional seminar.

A diplomatic cable obtained through a Freedom of Information request provides a relatively recent example of these efforts. The document gives an overview of anti-piracy training, provided and funded by the US Government, during the fall of 2015.

“On November 24 and 25, prosecutors and investigators from Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Turkey participated in a two-day, US. Department of Justice (USDOJ)-sponsored training program on combatting online piracy.

“The program updated participants on legal issues, including data retention legislation, surrounding the investigation and prosecution of online piracy,” the cable adds.

According to the cable, piracy has become a very significant problem in Eastern Europe, costing rightsholders and governments millions of dollars in revenues. After the training, local law enforcement officers in these countries should be better equipped to deal with the problem.

Pirates Beware

The event was put together with help from various embassies and among the presenters were law enforcement professionals from around the world.

The Director of the DoJ’s CCIPS Cybercrime Laboratory was among the speakers. He gave training on computer forensics and participants were provided with various tools to put this to use.

“Participants were given copies of forensic tools at the conclusion of the program so that they could put to use some of what they saw demonstrated during the training,” the cable reads.

While catching pirates can be quite hard already, getting them convicted is a challenge as well. Increasingly we’ve seen criminal complaints using non-copyright claims to have site owners prosecuted.

By using money laundering and tax offenses, pirates can receive tougher penalties. This was one of the talking points during the training as well.

“Participants were encouraged to consider the use of statutes such as money laundering and tax evasion, in addition to those protecting copyrights and trademarks, since these offenses are often punished more severely than standalone intellectual property crimes.”

The cable, written by the US Embassy in Bucharest, provides a lot of detail about the two-day training session. It’s also clear on the overall objective. The US wants to increase the likelihood that pirate sites are brought to justice. Not only in the homeland, but around the globe.

“By focusing approximately forty investigators and prosecutors from four countries on how they can more effectively attack rogue sites, and by connecting rights holders and their investigators with law enforcement, the chances of pirates being caught and held accountable have increased.”

While it’s hard to link the training to any concrete successes, Romanian law enforcement did shut down the country’s leading pirate site a few months later. As with a previous case in Romania, which involved the FBI, money laundering and tax evasion allegations were expected.

While it’s not out of the ordinary for international law enforcers to work together, it’s notable how coordinated the US efforts are. Earlier this week we wrote about the US pressure on Sweden to raid The Pirate Bay. And these are not isolated incidents.

While the US Department of Justice doesn’t reveal all details of its operations, it is very open about its global efforts to protect Intellectual Property.

Around the world..

The DoJ’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) has relationships with law enforcement worldwide and regularly provides training to foreign officers.

A crucial part of the Department’s international enforcement activities is the Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Coordinator (IPLEC) program, which started in 2006.

Through IPLECs, the department now has Attorneys stationed in Thailand, Hong Kong, Romania, Brazil, and Nigeria. These Attorneys keep an eye on local law enforcement and provide assistance and training, to protect US copyright holders.

“Our strategically placed coordinators draw upon their subject matter expertise to help ensure that property holders’ rights are enforced across the globe, and that the American people are protected from harmful products entering the marketplace,” Attorney General John Cronan of the Criminal Division said just last Friday.

Or to end with the title of the Romanian cable: ‘Pirates beware!’

—

—

The cable cited here was made available in response to a Freedom of Information request, which was submitted by Rachael Tackett and shared with TorrentFreak. It starts at page 47 of document 2.

Welcome to TimeShift

Big news this week: Grafana v5.0 has been merged into master and is available in the nightly builds! We are really excited to share this with the community, and look forward to receiving community feedback (good or bad) on the new features and enhancements. As you see in the video below, there are some big changes that aim to improve workflow, team organization, permissions, and overall user experience. Check out the video below to see it in action, and give it a spin yourself.

New Grid Layout Engine: Make it easier to build dashboards and enable more complex layouts

Monitor your Docker Containers: docker stats doesn’t often give you the level of insight you need to effectively manage your containers. This article discuses how to use cAdvisor, Prometheus and Grafana to get a handle on your Docker performance.

Icinga Web2 and Grafana Working Together: This is a follow-up post about displaying service performance data from Icinga2 in Grafana. Now that we know how to list the services on a dashboard, it would be helpful to filter this list so that specific teams can know the status of services they specifically manage.

Setup of sitespeed in AWS with Peter Hedenskog: In this video, Peter Hedenskop from Wikimedia and Stefan Judis set up a video call to go over setting up sitespeed in AWS. They create a fully functional Grafana dashboard, including web performance metrics from Stefan’s personal website running in the cloud.

New Speakers Added!

We have added new speakers, and talk titles to the lineup at grafanacon.org. Only a few left to include, which should be added in the next few days.

Join us March 1-2, 2018 in Amsterdam for 2 days of talks centered around Grafana and the surrounding monitoring ecosystem including Graphite, Prometheus, InfluxData, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, and many other topics.

This year we have speakers from Bloomberg, CERN, Tinder, Red Hat, Prometheus, InfluxData, Fastly, Automattic, Percona, and more!

Grafana Plugins

This week we have a new plugin for the popular IoT platform DeviceHive, and an update to our own Kubernetes App. To install or update any plugin in an on-prem Grafana instance, use the Grafana-cli tool, or install and update with 1 click on Hosted Grafana.

NEW PLUGIN

DeviceHive is an IOT Platform and now has a data source plugin, which means you can visualize the live commands and notifications from a device.

Upcoming Events:

In between code pushes we like to speak at, sponsor and attend all kinds of conferences and meetups. We also like to make sure we mention other Grafana-related events happening all over the world. If you’re putting on just such an event, let us know and we’ll list it here.

FOSDEM | Brussels, Belgium – Feb 3-4, 2018: FOSDEM is a free developer conference where thousands of developers of free and open source software gather to share ideas and technology. Carl Bergquist is managing the Cloud and Monitoring Devroom, and we’ve heard there were some great talks submitted. There is no need to register; all are welcome.

Tweet of the Week

We scour Twitter each week to find an interesting/beautiful dashboard and show it off! #monitoringLove

Ok, ok – This tweet isn’t showing a off a dashboard, but we can’t help but be thrilled when someone post about our poster series. We’ll be working on the fourth poster to be unveiled at GrafanaCon EU!

Grafana Labs is Hiring!

We are passionate about open source software and thrive on tackling complex challenges to build the future. We ship code from every corner of the globe and love working with the community. If this sounds exciting, you’re in luck – WE’RE HIRING!

How are we doing?

Let us know what you think about timeShift. Submit a comment on this article below, or post something at our community forum. Find an article I haven’t included? Send it my way. Help us make timeShift better!

One of the key benefits of serverless applications is the ease in which they can scale to meet traffic demands or requests, with little to no need for capacity planning. In AWS Lambda, which is the core of the serverless platform at AWS, the unit of scale is a concurrent execution. This refers to the number of executions of your function code that are happening at any given time.

Thinking about concurrent executions as a unit of scale is a fairly unique concept. In this post, I dive deeper into this and talk about how you can make use of per function concurrency limits in Lambda.

Understanding concurrency in Lambda

Instead of diving right into the guts of how Lambda works, here’s an appetizing analogy: a magical pizza. Yes, a magical pizza!

This magical pizza has some unique properties:

It has a fixed maximum number of slices, such as 8.

Slices automatically re-appear after they are consumed.

When you take a slice from the pizza, it does not re-appear until it has been completely consumed.

One person can take multiple slices at a time.

You can easily ask to have the number of slices increased, but they remain fixed at any point in time otherwise.

Now that the magical pizza’s properties are defined, here’s a hypothetical situation of some friends sharing this pizza.

Shawn, Kate, Daniela, Chuck, Ian and Avleen get together every Friday to share a pizza and catch up on their week. As there is just six of them, they can easily all enjoy a slice of pizza at a time. As they finish each slice, it re-appears in the pizza pan and they can take another slice again. Given the magical properties of their pizza, they can continue to eat all they want, but with two very important constraints:

If any of them take too many slices at once, the others may not get as much as they want.

If they take too many slices, they might also eat too much and get sick.

One particular week, some of the friends are hungrier than the rest, taking two slices at a time instead of just one. If more than two of them try to take two pieces at a time, this can cause contention for pizza slices. Some of them would wait hungry for the slices to re-appear. They could ask for a pizza with more slices, but then run the same risk again later if more hungry friends join than planned for.

What can they do?

If the friends agreed to accept a limit for the maximum number of slices they each eat concurrently, both of these issues are avoided. Some could have a maximum of 2 of the 8 slices, or other concurrency limits that were more or less. Just so long as they kept it at or under eight total slices to be eaten at one time. This would keep any from going hungry or eating too much. The six friends can happily enjoy their magical pizza without worry!

Concurrency in Lambda

Concurrency in Lambda actually works similarly to the magical pizza model. Each AWS Account has an overall AccountLimit value that is fixed at any point in time, but can be easily increased as needed, just like the count of slices in the pizza. As of May 2017, the default limit is 1000 “slices” of concurrency per AWS Region.

Also like the magical pizza, each concurrency “slice” can only be consumed individually one at a time. After consumption, it becomes available to be consumed again. Services invoking Lambda functions can consume multiple slices of concurrency at the same time, just like the group of friends can take multiple slices of the pizza.

Let’s take our example of the six friends and bring it back to AWS services that commonly invoke Lambda:

Amazon S3

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon Cognito

In a single account with the default concurrency limit of 1000 concurrent executions, any of these four services could invoke enough functions to consume the entire limit or some part of it. Just like with the pizza example, there is the possibility for two issues to pop up:

One or more of these services could invoke enough functions to consume a majority of the available concurrency capacity. This could cause others to be starved for it, causing failed invocations.

A service could consume too much concurrent capacity and cause a downstream service or database to be overwhelmed, which could cause failed executions.

For Lambda functions that are launched in a VPC, you have the potential to consume the available IP addresses in a subnet or the maximum number of elastic network interfaces to which your account has access. For more information, see Configuring a Lambda Function to Access Resources in an Amazon VPC. For information about elastic network interface limits, see Network Interfaces section in the Amazon VPC Limits topic.

One way to solve both of these problems is applying a concurrency limit to the Lambda functions in an account.

Configuring per function concurrency limits

You can now set a concurrency limit on individual Lambda functions in an account. The concurrency limit that you set reserves a portion of your account level concurrency for a given function. All of your functions’ concurrent executions count against this account-level limit by default.

If you set a concurrency limit for a specific function, then that function’s concurrency limit allocation is deducted from the shared pool and assigned to that specific function. AWS also reserves 100 units of concurrency for all functions that don’t have a specified concurrency limit set. This helps to make sure that future functions have capacity to be consumed.

Going back to the example of the consuming services, you could set throttles for the functions as follows:

With the 100 reserved for all non-concurrency reserved functions, this totals the account limit of 1000.

Here’s how this works. To start, create a basic Lambda function that is invoked via Amazon API Gateway. This Lambda function returns a single “Hello World” statement with an added sleep time between 2 and 5 seconds. The sleep time simulates an API providing some sort of capability that can take a varied amount of time. The goal here is to show how an API that is underloaded can reach its concurrency limit, and what happens when it does.To create the example function

Throwing load at the function

Now start throwing some load against your API Gateway + Lambda function combo. Right now, your function is only limited by the total amount of concurrency available in an account. For this example account, you might have 850 unreserved concurrency out of a full account limit of 1000 due to having configured a few concurrency limits already (also the 100 concurrency saved for all functions without configured limits). You can find all of this information on the main Dashboard page of the Lambda console:

For generating load in this example, use an open source tool called “hey” (https://github.com/rakyll/hey), which works similarly to ApacheBench (ab). You test from an Amazon EC2 instance running the default Amazon Linux AMI from the EC2 console. For more help with configuring an EC2 instance, follow the steps in the Launch Instance Wizard.

After the EC2 instance is running, SSH into the host and run the following:

sudo yum install go
go get -u github.com/rakyll/hey

“hey” is easy to use. For these tests, specify a total number of tests (5,000) and a concurrency of 50 against the API Gateway URL as follows(replace the URL here with your own):

You can see a helpful histogram and latency distribution. Remember that this Lambda function has a random sleep period in it and so isn’t entirely representational of a real-life workload. Those three 502s warrant digging deeper, but could be due to Lambda cold-start timing and the “second” variable being the maximum of 5, causing the Lambda functions to time out. AWS X-Ray and the Amazon CloudWatch logs generated by both API Gateway and Lambda could help you troubleshoot this.

Configuring a concurrency reservation

Now that you’ve established that you can generate this load against the function, I show you how to limit it and protect a backend resource from being overloaded by all of these requests.

In the console, choose Configure.

Under Concurrency, for Reserve concurrency, enter 25.

Click on Save in the top right corner.

You could also set this with the AWS CLI using the Lambda put-function-concurrency command or see your current concurrency configuration via Lambda get-function. Here’s an example command:

Either way, you’ve set the Concurrency Reservation to 25 for this function. This acts as both a limit and a reservation in terms of making sure that you can execute 25 concurrent functions at all times. Going above this results in the throttling of the Lambda function. Depending on the invoking service, throttling can result in a number of different outcomes, as shown in the documentation on Throttling Behavior. This change has also reduced your unreserved account concurrency for other functions by 25.

Rerun the same load generation as before and see what happens. Previously, you tested at 50 concurrency, which worked just fine. By limiting the Lambda functions to 25 concurrency, you should see rate limiting kick in. Run the same test again:

This looks fairly different from the last load test run. A large percentage of these requests failed fast due to the concurrency throttle failing them (those with the 0.724 seconds line). The timing shown here in the histogram represents the entire time it took to get a response between the EC2 instance and API Gateway calling Lambda and being rejected. It’s also important to note that this example was configured with an edge-optimized endpoint in API Gateway. You see under Status code distribution that 3076 of the 5000 requests failed with a 502, showing that the backend service from API Gateway and Lambda failed the request.

Other uses

Managing function concurrency can be useful in a few other ways beyond just limiting the impact on downstream services and providing a reservation of concurrency capacity. Here are two other uses:

Emergency kill switch

Cost controls

Emergency kill switch

On occasion, due to issues with applications I’ve managed in the past, I’ve had a need to disable a certain function or capability of an application. By setting the concurrency reservation and limit of a Lambda function to zero, you can do just that.

With the reservation set to zero every invocation of a Lambda function results in being throttled. You could then work on the related parts of the infrastructure or application that aren’t working, and then reconfigure the concurrency limit to allow invocations again.

Cost controls

While I mentioned how you might want to use concurrency limits to control the downstream impact to services or databases that your Lambda function might call, another resource that you might be cautious about is money. Setting the concurrency throttle is another way to help control costs during development and testing of your application.

You might want to prevent against a function performing a recursive action too quickly or a development workload generating too high of a concurrency. You might also want to protect development resources connected to this function from generating too much cost, such as APIs that your Lambda function calls.

Conclusion

Concurrent executions as a unit of scale are a fairly unique characteristic about Lambda functions. Placing limits on how many concurrency “slices” that your function can consume can prevent a single function from consuming all of the available concurrency in an account. Limits can also prevent a function from overwhelming a backend resource that isn’t as scalable.

Unlike monolithic applications or even microservices where there are mixed capabilities in a single service, Lambda functions encourage a sort of “nano-service” of small business logic directly related to the integration model connected to the function. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and configure your concurrency limits today!

This post was developed and written by Jeremy Cowan, Thomas Fuller, Samuel Karp, and Akram Chetibi.

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Containers have revolutionized the way that developers build, package, deploy, and run applications. Initially, containers only supported code and tooling for Linux applications. With the release of Docker Engine for Windows Server 2016, Windows developers have started to realize the gains that their Linux counterparts have experienced for the last several years.

This week, we’re adding support for running production workloads in Windows containers using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Now, Amazon ECS provides an ECS-Optimized Windows Server Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This AMI is based on the EC2 Windows Server 2016 AMI, and includes Docker 17.06 Enterprise Edition and the ECS Agent 1.16. This AMI provides improved instance and container launch time performance. It’s based on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter and includes Docker 17.06.2-ee-5, along with a new version of the ECS agent that now runs as a native Windows service.

In this post, I discuss the benefits of this new support, and walk you through getting started running Windows containers with Amazon ECS.

When AWS released the Windows Server 2016 Base with Containers AMI, the ECS agent ran as a process that made it difficult to monitor and manage. As a service, the agent can be health-checked, managed, and restarted no differently than other Windows services. The AMI also includes pre-cached images for Windows Server Core 2016 and Windows Server Nano Server 2016. By caching the images in the AMI, launching new Windows containers is significantly faster. When Docker images include a layer that’s already cached on the instance, Docker re-uses that layer instead of pulling it from the Docker registry.

The ECS agent and an accompanying ECS PowerShell module used to install, configure, and run the agent come pre-installed on the AMI. This guarantees there is a specific platform version available on the container instance at launch. Because the software is included, you don’t have to download it from the internet. This saves startup time.

The Windows-compatible ECS-optimized AMI also reports CPU and memory utilization and reservation metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. Using the CloudWatch integration with ECS, you can create alarms that trigger dynamic scaling events to automatically add or remove capacity to your EC2 instances and ECS tasks.

The reference architecture is a layered CloudFormation stack, in that it calls other stacks to create the environment. Within the stack, the ecs-windows-cluster.yaml file contains the instructions for bootstrapping the Windows instances and configuring the ECS cluster. To configure the instances outside of AWS CloudFormation (for example, through the CLI or the console), you can add the following commands to your instance’s user data:

If you don’t specify a cluster name when you initialize the agent, the instance is joined to the default cluster.

Adding -EnableIAMTaskRole when initializing the agent adds support for IAM roles for tasks. Previously, enabling this setting meant running a complex script and setting an environment variable before you could assign roles to your ECS tasks.

When you enable IAM roles for tasks on Windows, it consumes port 80 on the host. If you have tasks that listen on port 80 on the host, I recommend configuring a service for them that uses load balancing. You can use port 80 on the load balancer, and the traffic can be routed to another host port on your container instances. For more information, see Service Load Balancing.

Create a cluster

To create a new ECS cluster, choose Launch stack, or pull the GitHub project to your local machine and run the following command:

Upload your container image

Now that you have a cluster running, step through how to build and push an image into a container repository. You use a repository hosted in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) for this, but you could also use Docker Hub. To build and push an image to a repository, install Docker on your Windows* workstation. You also create a repository and assign the necessary permissions to the account that pushes your image to Amazon ECR. For detailed instructions, see Pushing an Image.

* If you are building an image that is based on Windows layers, then you must use a Windows environment to build and push your image to the registry.

Write your task definition

Now that your image is built and ready, the next step is to run your Windows containers using a task.

Start by creating a new task definition based on the windows-simple-iis image from Docker Hub.

You can now go back into the Task Definition page and see windows-simple-iis as an available task definition.

There are a few important aspects of the task definition file to note when working with Windows containers. First, the hostPort is configured as 8080, which is necessary because the ECS agent currently uses port 80 to enable IAM roles for tasks required for least-privilege security configurations.

There are also some fairly standard task parameters that are intentionally not included. For example, network mode is not available with Windows at the time of this release, so keep that setting blank to allow Docker to configure WinNAT, the only option available today.

Also, some parameters work differently with Windows than they do with Linux. The CPU limits that you define in the task definition are absolute, whereas on Linux they are weights. For information about other task parameters that are supported or possibly different with Windows, see the documentation.

Run your containers

At this point, you are ready to run containers. There are two options to run containers with ECS:

Task

Service

A task is typically a short-lived process that ECS creates. It can’t be configured to actively monitor or scale. A service is meant for longer-running containers and can be configured to use a load balancer, minimum/maximum capacity settings, and a number of other knobs and switches to help ensure that your code keeps running. In both cases, you are able to pick a placement strategy and a specific IAM role for your container.

Select the task definition that you created above and choose Action, Run Task.

Leave the settings on the next page to the default values.

Select the ECS cluster created when you ran the CloudFormation template.

Choose Run Task to start the process of scheduling a Docker container on your ECS cluster.

You can now go to the cluster and watch the status of your task. It may take 5–10 minutes for the task to go from PENDING to RUNNING, mostly because it takes time to download all of the layers necessary to run the microsoft/iis image. After the status is RUNNING, you should see the following results:

You may have noticed that the example task definition is named windows-simple-iis:2. This is because I created a second version of the task definition, which is one of the powerful capabilities of using ECS. You can make the task definitions part of your source code and then version them. You can also roll out new versions and practice blue/green deployment, switching to reduce downtime and improve the velocity of your deployments!

After the task has moved to RUNNING, you can see your website hosted in ECS. Find the public IP or DNS for your ECS host. Remember that you are hosting on port 8080. Make sure that the security group allows ingress from your client IP address to that port and that your VPC has an internet gateway associated with it. You should see a page that looks like the following:

This is a nice start to deploying a simple single instance task, but what if you had a Web API to be scaled out and in based on usage? This is where you could look at defining a service and collecting CloudWatch data to add and remove both instances of the task. You could also use CloudWatch alarms to add more ECS container instances and keep up with the demand. The former is built into the configuration of your service.

Select the task definition and choose Create Service.

Associate a load balancer.

Set up Auto Scaling.

The following screenshot shows an example where you would add an additional task instance when the CPU Utilization CloudWatch metric is over 60% on average over three consecutive measurements. This may not be aggressive enough for your requirements; it’s meant to show you the option to scale tasks the same way you scale ECS instances with an Auto Scaling group. The difference is that these tasks start much faster because all of the base layers are already on the ECS host.

Feeling uncontainable? re:Invent 2017 might be over, but the containers party doesn’t have to stop. Here are some ways you can keep learning about containers on AWS.

Learn about containers in Austin and New York

Come join AWS this week at KubeCon in Austin, Texas! We’ll be sharing best practices for running Kubernetes on AWS and talking about Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and Amazon EKS. Want to take Amazon EKS for a test drive? Sign up for the preview.

We’ll also be talking Containers at the NYC Pop-up Loft during AWS Compute Evolved: Containers Day on December 13th. Register to attend.

Join an upcoming webinar

Didn’t get to attend re:Invent or want to hear a recap? Join our upcoming webinar, What You Missed at re:Invent 2017, on December 11th from 12:00 PM – 12:40 PM PT (3:00 PM – 3:40 PM ET). Register to attend.

Start (or finish) a workshop

All of the containers workshops given at re:Invent are available online. Get comfortable, fire up your browser, and start building!

re:Watch your favorite talks

All of the keynote and breakouts from re:Invent are available to watch on our YouTube playlist. Slides can be found as they are uploaded on the AWS Slideshare. Just slip into your pajamas, make some popcorn, and start watching!

Learn more about what’s new

Andy Jassy announced two big updates to the container landscape at re:Invent, AWS Fargate and Amazon EKS. Here are some resources to help you learn more about all the new features and products we announced, why we built them, and how they work.

AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a technology that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS)

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to configure and operate your own Kubernetes clusters.

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